One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Saturday, September 08, 2012

Forty-six
years ago on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC
television.

A franchise was born, and a
legend begun.

I
didn't come along until Star Trek had already ended, in late 1969, but the series remains
one of the most important and enduring influences in my life.

The stories were inspiring, exciting, and
often romantic. Most importantly they meant something.

The
episodes dealt with issues like brinkmanship (“A Private Little War”),
racism (“Let that Be Your Last Battlefield,” “Balance of Terror”), technology (“The
Ultimate Computer”), brotherhood (“The Empath”), the value of diversity (“Is
There in Truth No Beauty,”) and much more.

And
the resolution of each week’s story didn’t occur simply because of the phaser
banks. The answers to improving the
human condition weren’t just about people shooting each other. Strength was often defined by showing mercy, setting aside prejudice, or just looking at things in a new way.

Consequently, Star
Trek is now a philosophy, a way of life, an American institution, a multi-generational “myth”
and so much more. Happy Birthday!

(And today, incidentally, is also the 23rd anniversary of my first date with my beautiful wife.)

The
Land of the Lost gets a new resident -- the
emotionless and pitiless alien “Zarn” (Marvin Miller) -- in this week’s
episode penned by Dick Martin and directed by Bob Lally.

The
Zarn is an energy being, mostly invisible, whose presence is accompanied by the
unsettling sound of wind chimes. What’s even scarier is that the Zarn’s space
craft has crashed in the gloomy Mist Marsh, place of fog and gnarled old, dead
trees. And as the Marshalls learn this
week, The Zarn can read their very thoughts, though he is repelled by the power
of intense emotions.

In
“The Zarn,” this stranded alien creates an android in the shape of a human
female to observe and study the human Marshalls. Because she is created expressly from Rick’s
thoughts, Sharon (Brooke Bundy) shares his memories of growing up in
Indianapolis. Holly and Will immediately
recognize Sharon is too good to be true, but Marshall is lonely and hungry for
adult companionship. He can’t help but
love Sharon.

Rick
Marshall’s tunnel vision about Sharon may be a little unrealistic in these
circumstances, but this is nonetheless one aspect of Land of the Lost I
admire. It’s that part of a “kid’s” show
that is very grown-up, and features mature plot lines. Rick’s confession of loneliness is heartfelt
and rings true. And yet Holly and Will’s feelings of being shunted aside for
the interloper are just as valid.

The
alien Zarn himself makes a great addition to this series extensive “creature”
list, a new not-quite friend and not-quite foe who -- like the Sleestak -- possesses his own distinctive technology and
world view.

Despite his great knowledge
and science, however, the Zarn -- like
The Marshalls -- is a prisoner in the Land of the Lost.

And keeping with the series’ environmental
message, the character is something of a loose cannon, one will apply his
technology at the expense of Altrusia as we see in the upcoming episode “Gravity
Storm.” The Zarn is out to help himself,
in other words, and no one or anything else.

One
question raised by the Zarn’s presence here involves the last episode of Season
One, “Circle,” which established that balance in Altrusia must constantly be maintained. So if the Zarn came in, who left? And how did they escape? This episode never addresses this
contradiction.

Another
aspect of this episode that seems dated poorly involves Holly, who is left at
the High Bluff Cave to cook dinner for Will and Rick while they explore the
Mist Marsh. Girls can’t go
exploring?

Worse,
it is Holly who feels most displaced by the presence of Sharon, another
woman. She’s clearly jealous that
someone could jeopardize her standing in the family, and it comes off as catty
and kind of demeaning…even though she’s right that Sharon is hiding something.

For
a series that stressed Holly’s courage (“Elsewhen”) and dawning
independence/maturity (“The Search,”) this re-establishment of 1970s
traditional American sex roles feels like a big step back into the prehistoric
era.

“Instead of raising
the tragic possibility that a subculture might disappear, Southern Comfort explores our anxiety that the dominant culture
itself may be divided and destroyed.
[It] seems to suggest that destruction is the price of the desire to use
-- rather than understand – another
culture.”

“Southern
Comfort” is not only a liqueur (a New Orleans original, so-to-speak…), but a
turn of phrase that links a storied American region with ideas like relaxation,
hospitality, and succor.

Walter
Hill’s 1981 film Southern Comfort plays ironically on the meaning of the term,
and forges the director’s second effort -- after The Warriors (1979) --
that involves outnumbered soldiers trapped in harsh enemy territory and forced
to fight every step of the way home.

But
Southern
Comfort is rather steadfastly not the urban fantasy of The
Warriors.

Instead,
it’s a blistering social critique as well as a violent action film. By setting his film in the year 1973 and
featuring as his protagonists soldiers from the Louisiana National Guard, Hill
crafts a film that, according to Michael Sragow in Rolling Stone, is a “parody
of the military sensibility,” “a
metaphor for the Vietnam War” and a “study
of gracelessness under fire.”

The
other films I’ve featured here on Savage Friday have dealt with crime (Bonnie
& Clyde [1967]) as pro-social response to a rigged system, and the
morality of violence following personal aggression of the most brutal, personal
sort (Irreversible [2002], The Last House on the Left [1972], I
Spit on Your Grave [1978]).

Additionally,
some of the films have dealt overtly with the concept of what happens to a
civilized man when he must, by needs, eschew the boundaries of civilized
behavior and act violently (Deliverance [1972], Straw
Dogs [1971]).

But
Southern
Comfort is the first film from the bunch that gazes at violence on a
wider, almost institutionalized basis.
Specifically, it looks at the idea of a nation knowingly unloosing aggression and violence on a mass scale, often
times by soldiers who are not educated about the nature of the enemy, are
insensitive to cultural differences, and who – finally – crack under pressure.

Can war ever be a
moral “right?” And if so, does it matter
who, specifically, a nation sends to war, and how those men wage that war?

These
are not easy questions to answer. And these
were not small issues in the days of Vietnam, a war that severely tested
American beliefs about its own national might and moral rectitude. Southern Comfort suggests a
home-grown Vietnam culture-clash right here, inside our regional borders, and a
so-called “primitive” culture dwelling side-by-side with the more “advanced,”
dominant one.

By
making this sustained cinematic battle an intra-American one, so-to-speak -- American
National Guard vs. American Cajuns -- Walter Hill allows viewers to see
concepts not always readily apparent in the case of foreign wars, where patriotism
can overwhelm reason and balance. In
America we cherish and protect our right and responsibility to defend our homes
and even our right just to be left alone, the very concepts that the Cajuns wage
bloody guerilla war over in the film.
But when we’re the aggressors
intruding in the territory of others, our values seem to change. This film holds up a mirror to that paradox.
It is an unromantic, un-idealized view of war and soldiers.

Notice
that I didn’t say negative view. The approach here is even-handed, revealing
how soldiers can be smart and heroic, as well as misguided and out-of-control. The trenchant idea seems to be that of the Pandora’s Box. If you release men with guns into an untamed
environment, where danger is everywhere, each will respond in his own way. Some will find and adhere to a strong moral
compass. Others will degenerate into
sadistic violence.

Furthermore,
Southern
Comfort suggests, as the quote from Jeffrey Mahan above observes, that
a dominant culture out to “use” a weaker culture is actually the one in danger
of being “divided and destroyed.” That
destruction comes about from a moral
failure, the failure to contextualize “the enemy” as human, and understand
the enemy on human terms. Specifically,
if we use our might just to take resources from others, or to argue for the
assertion of our ideology in someone else’s land, we are in violation of our
own cherished beliefs and values. We say
“don’t tread on me,” but if someone else has what we want, we tread on them
with the greatest military machine in history.

This
cerebral argument doesn’t make Walter Hill’s film any less tense or violent,
but rather adds a layer of commentary to the savagery. As critic Diane Hust wrote in “Heavy
Symbolism Ravels Film’s Good Yarn” (The
Daily Oklahoman, November 12, 1981): “These
‘civilized’ but allegedly trained soldiers fall apart in a blue-green otherworld,
and even the likable heroes...have brutal and vulnerable sides that emerge
during the ordeal.”

The
idea here is that all soldiers are not created equal, and until the crucible of
combat occurs, it’s almost impossible to determine who will thrive, and who
will succumb to cowardice, or animalistic brutality. The film walks a delicate balance, but not
everyone agrees it succeeds. Vincent Canby
at The
New York Times noted that Walter Hill is “the best stager of action in practice,” but found the film to be “more an exercise in masochism than suspense.” Yes, in some way, the same argument could be
made of every entry in the Savage Cinema genre.

Time
Magazine
noted (derisively) that in Southern Comfort “everything is a metaphor for something else,”
but that’s okay with me too. When
vetting extreme violence, I prefer that movies boast and reflect an intellectual point-of-view about that
violence. In other words, the
violence becomes palatable and
meaningful because we sense it is being applied to convey a point of intellectual
merit.

In
this case, Southern Comfort reminds us that once war is uncorked, and men
are encouraged to rely on instinctive, violent impulses, all bets are off
concerning outcomes. It also reminds us how people with guns can, in a moment
of impulse spark a conflagration that can’t be controlled.

“Comes a time when you have to abandon principles and do
what's right.”

In 1973, the Louisiana National Guard’s “Bravo Team”
practices maneuvers in the bayou, tromping through nearly forty kilometers of
treacherous and dangerous natural terrain.

Soon, the squad becomes lost and realizes it must procure
transportation to traverse a river.
Accordingly, Sgt. Pool (Peter Coyote) orders the men to appropriate
three Cajun canoes. Worse, one of the
soldiers, Stuckey (Lewis Smith) playfully opens fire on the Cajun owners.

They don’t realize his weapon is loaded with blanks, and
respond with sustained lethal force. In
the first attack, Sgt. Pool is shot down, and the Cajuns begin hunting down
“Bravo Team.”

Inexperienced and scared, the reservists make a bad situation
worse when they seek shelter at the home of a French-speaking trapper (Brion
James), and blow up his house using dynamite.

As the reservists die in the swamp, one by one, the
level-headed Spencer (Keith Carradine) and a transfer from Texas, Hardin
(Powers Boothe) try to hold their own and maintain some sense of order and
control.

They eventually escape the treacherous bayou, but end up in a
remote Cajun village in the middle of nowhere…

“Well, you know how it is, down here in Louisiana, we don't
carry guns, we carry ropes, RC colas and moon pies, we're not too smart, but we
have a real good time.”

Set
in “the great primordial swamp,”
Hill’s hard-driving polemic, Southern Comfort shreds typical
bromides about “supporting the troops” and gazes instead, in rather even-handed
(if googcombat, ill-prepared emotionally,
intellectually and even physically in some cases.

Powers
Boothe portrays Hardin, one of Southern Comfort’s main
protagonists. He’s a chemical engineer
who recently transferred from Texas, and he immediately understands the brand
of man he’s now training with. He calls
them “the same dumb rednecks” he’s
been around his “whole life.”

In
short order, this descriptor proves tragically accurate. His fellow “soldiers”
steal private property (canoes), and open fire – as a dumb joke! -- upon unaware American citizens, the local
Cajuns.

The
same “dumb rednecks,” meanwhile, deride the Cajuns as “dumb asses” or primitives. It’s
true that director Hill has on occasion rejected the Vietnam metaphor encoded
in his film, but it’s apparent that these soldiers view the Cajuns precisely as
some Americans viewed “Charlie:” inferiors who couldn’t possibly pose a threat
to modern, technologically-superior Americans.

Again,
cementing this Vietnam allegory, the Cajuns in the film boast a strategic advantage
because they are familiar with the harsh landscape of their “homeland.”

Also,
they resort to guerilla tactics, deploying deadly booby traps and other hazards
against the lost soldiers. Like the Viet
Cong, then, the Cajuns have been underestimated, and prove more resourceful and
cunning than the forces of the more technologically-advanced culture.

This
is very much the same dynamic we see in another film Walter Hill produced, 1986’s
Aliens. There, the titular xenomorphs with their underground
(sub-level) tunnels (hive) were grossly under-estimated by soldiers packing
high-tech weaponry. They were derided as
“animals,” but they executed brilliant battle strategy. The idea in both instances is the arrogance
of military might, and the misapplication of military power.

Much
of Southern
Comfort finds the Guardsmen lost, confused, and running in circles as
the Cajun hunters pick them off one at a time. Making the plight of the Guardsmen
even more dangerous and harrowing, they lose their leader early on, in the
equivalent of a decapitation strike.

Also,
and again repeating aspects of the Vietnam War dynamic, the Guardsmen are
absolutely unable to distinguish allies from enemies, “good” Cajuns from “bad”
ones. They think (literally) that all
the enemies look alike and capture and torture one Cajun man they are convinced
must be the one that shot the sergeant.
In short, in “alien” territory, the members of Bravo Team are completely
cluelessness about the nature of things. Yet this doesn’t stop them from acting
aggressively, impulsively and violently.

Roger
Ebert writes persuasively about this metaphor, though notes the fact that
it is plain early on: “From the moment we
discover that the guardsmen are firing blanks in their rifles, we somehow know
that the movie’s going to be about their impotence in a land where they do not
belong. And as the weekend soldiers are
relentlessly hunted down…we think of the useless of American technology against
the Viet Cong.”

Tremendous
tension is generated throughout Southern Comfort not merely by the
presence of the almost invisible, omnipresent enemy, but in the exploitation of
another brilliantly-expressed (and, yes… politically incorrect) fear. This is, simply, the fear that your comrade-in-arms is a redneck idiot who could do
something stupid at any time.

For
the most part, and excepting one or two important characters, the members of
Bravo Team prove that they are not trustworthy, capable or smart. It’s a two-front war: battling the enemy, and
battling “self.” This again seems like a
metaphor for The Vietnam War, where incidents including the My-Lai Massacre
raised questions and concerns about the military’s behavior.

The
ineptitude of the Guardsmen is also apparent in the team’s misuse of their
resources. They continually waste their limited bullets, so that in the end
they can’t even rely on their superior equipment. Ironically the group is termed Bravo Team according to protocol right up
until the very end, yet this group has never been a team, and one senses that
this is why things go badly. There is no
camaraderie, no respect, and no trust.
These men are thrown together and have little in common. Unlike the Cajuns, who work in silent tandem
and strike without warning, the Guardsmen blunder and failm except for a few – namely Hardin and Spencer -- who
evidence common sense at least.

Southern
Comfort shares
core thematic elements with John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), though, as I’ve
noted above, in a far more militaristic setting. Both films are set in
treacherous, difficult landscapes. Both
films involve a diverse group of men who, individually, see things very
differently. And both films pit the “visitors”
(or invaders) against another culture with superior knowledge of the landscape.

Southern
Comfort adds
to the Deliverance equation the dangerous and unpredictable factor of
guns, and indeed, lots of them. This
addition changes the central dynamic a bit.
In Deliverance, the “invaders” on the river never actually did
anything violent to the inbred mountain folk that attacked them. Sure, they were insulting “city folks” who
thought they knew better. They didn’t
belong on that river, and were rude to everyone they met. But they didn’t strike back and wage war until
their lives were on the line. Their
posture, in terms of violence, was largely self-defense.

In
Southern
Comfort, by contrast, BravoTeam steals property and opens fire on the
Cajuns. The Cajuns don’t have the
luxury of “knowing” the attack occurred with blanks. All they know is that they are suddenly under
siege, on their own land. The posture is
different. In this case, the Cajuns
believe war is being waged against them.
And foolishly, Bravo Team has started that war.

The
last thirty minutes of Southern Comfort are hair-raising
and terrifying, as Hardin and Spencer survive the deadly traps and gun battles
only to reach a Cajun village. Hill
provides a trenchant image of the soldiers’ plight here. They sit on the back
of a Cajun transport, the truck carrying them to ostensible freedom. But placed
nearby, in a key visualization, are two
pigs trapped in cages. The Guardsmen
don’t realize it yet, but they are in as much imminent danger as the trapped
animals.

When
the men reach the village and the increasingly fast, increasingly intense Cajun
music becomes a near constant on the film’s soundtrack, the locals ominously
ready two nooses in the center of town…either for Spencer and Hardin, or for
the pigs. This portion of the film,
fostering ambivalence and paranoia, is almost unbearably suspenseful in my
opinion.

Again,
the soldiers (and the viewers too) have difficulty understanding this “foreign”
enemy and discerning its motives. In
that “fog,” we begin to understand why people react fearfully and impulsively
when in danger. In essence, Hill makes
us understand how terrifying it is to be in a place far from home, observing
customs you can’t understand, and having to make “calls” that could result in
your death. This ability to place us in
Hardin and Spencer’s shoes is one reason why the film doesn’t indict all soldiers. It makes us “feel” their plight, and
understand why mistakes happen. Again, I
count the film as pretty even-handed and judicious. We see both really bad soldiers, and some
really good ones.

Finally,
the film ends in a frenetic, almost insane flurry of dancing, spinning and
slow-motion, graphic violence as the Guardsmen are drawn into more battle, this
time of a much bloodier, personal dimension.
The first time I watched this finale, I was literally up on my feet
because it’s so damn intense, and because I felt so invested in the
outcome. Again, viewers wouldn’t feel
that way if Hill were indicting all soldiers or making an anti-American film.

There’s
no comfort at all in Southern Comfort, and that, finally,
is the point. The film effectively
captures the “domino effect” that can occur once groups of armed men -- without leaders and without any real common sense,
either -- start letting bullets fly.
Gunfire is a threshold that, once traversed, is difficult to come back
from. “Survival is a mental outlook,”
one character in the film insists.
Indeed, but survival is made exponentially more difficult when the guy
in the fox hole next to you is a moron, or you don’t understand local customs,
or you’re lost, or you’re out of bullets.

This is the very crux of Savage Cinema ideas. In
the absence of safety and security, violence is, perhaps, inevitable. But in
that situation I certainly hope there are level-headed guys like Spencer and Hardin
around. They fight to survive, but also
never lose sight of the concept of civilization.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

“We only have to
look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we
wouldn’t want to meet.…If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be
much as when Christopher Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out very
well for the Native Americans.”

-Stephen
Hawking

Hollywood
certainly has squeezed a lot of creative mileage lately from that quote
excerpted above, and rightly so. The idea
of malevolent aliens raping and pillaging the Earth -- and wiping us out in the process -- is a powerful and frightening
one indeed.

It
works so easily in our current global context, I suspect, because we seem to be
developing new and powerful technologies daily, while our wisdom hasn’t necessarily
gone hand-in-hand with the “improvements.”
It’s not difficult to imagine a race of desperate, resource-starved aliens
casting their eyes upon our beautiful home world, and deciding that we’re ripe
for the plucking. It’s their survival or
ours.

To
one extent or another, films including Skyline (2011), Battle: LA (2011), and
even The
Darkest Hour (2011) have all been informed by this notion of alien
imperialists looting our beloved Mother Earth and committing genocide against mankind.

This
summer’s Battleship-- based on
the famous game by Hasbro -- utilizes the same inspiration to generally
positive effect. Here, a distant planet
in the “Goldilocks Zone” of its star system sends an advanced military scout
team of five ships to assess our planet for invasion and/or colonization. But its communications’ ship is destroyed in
orbit, meaning that the aliens must harness our own satellite technology
against us.

Cue
the U.S. Navy, which by happenstance is undergoing a battle exercise in the
Pacific just as the alien force set-up camp in the ocean.

With
only three naval vessels inside the aliens’ force field bubble and able to
intervene in the crisis on humanity’s behalf, the Navy must stop the aliens
from sending home a message indicating that the coast is clear for all-out
invasion.

Leading
the surviving Navy ship -- and quite
unexpectedly so -- is untested Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), a slack,
rule-breaking officer who is about to be drummed out of the service for conduct
unbecoming an officer.

Does
this insubordinate, unserious loser have what it takes to save the Earth and
all-of-the human race?

In
broad strokes, that’sBattleship’s narrative.

And
in short, this movie is big, dumb, and, well, fun. The film’s first few establishing scenes, with
a “Burrito Girl” booty run are so breathtakingly stupid you may be tempted to
turn off the film at once and watch something else. But try to hold on.

Because
after an egregiously rough first act, Battleship picks itself up, dusts
itself off, and offers a compelling tale of human vs. alien combat on the open sea. Going in, one should understand that Battleship
is a generic “blockbuster”-type film, not prone to subtlety or nuance. But the special effects are extraordinary,
and the cat-and-mouse battle between the denizens of Earth and the evil aliens
grows increasingly tense and desperate.

Battleship
is thus a
movie you can fall in love with for at least one night. You may hate yourself
the next morning.

But gee whiz, what
a night…

Directed
by Peter Berg -- who brought television one of its best dramatic series ever in
Friday
Night Lights -- Battleship really goes for the gusto
here, plucking every string in its overwrought, manipulative arsenal to prime
entertainment effect. There’s an
East/West rapprochement (at Pearl Harbor, no less), a paean to soldiers wounded
in war, and a twenty-one gun salute to the Greatest Generation.

I
must admit, I indeed felt a lump form in my throat form while watching the
eighty-year old veterans of World War II take the battleship U.S.S. Missouri out
of mothballs to save freedom…one last
time. It’s cheesy as all Hell, but
it works. By the time of the Missouri’s up-fit for battle against the evil
aliens, I knew the movie had me in its grip.

Treading
a bit deeper, Battleship features two qualities that help it land a cut above
the Michael Bay Transformersmovies.
These are: the depiction of the aliens as only slightly more advanced
humanoids than us, and the nature of the decision-making during the crisis.

On
the former front, the film -- again like Battle: LA -- pits man against
aliens who are just a little bit ahead of us in terms of their technology. They have a big advantage, but it isn’t
necessarily a decisive one. Once we
learn their weaknesses, it’s game on. Again,
one must consider this dynamic a metaphor for the Iraq War. There, our forces romped easily to Baghdad,
but then had to face a homegrown insurgency.
I enjoy how the aliens are presented in Battleship because they
seem like authentic soldiers, not just hissable movie villains. They’re here to do a specific job, not engage
in unnecessary brutality, and they are close enough to us in terms of
physicality that we can recognize their motives. They’re completing a mission they've been tasked with; nothing more.

On
the latter front, Battleshipputs its
Navy personnel through the wringer, and again and again asks Hopper to choose
between two equally unenviable and difficult options. At some point, the discussion of the crew
surviving the day is off the table. It
all comes down to one question: how do we leverage whatever advantage we have
to save the planet? For all its
shallow and generic qualities, Battleship asks its main characters
to make some pretty tough calls.

I
suspect the readership here already knows exactly what kind of film Battleship
is. It’s a film where handicapped soldiers
get-up on their (prosthetic) feet and triumphantly walk, where cowardly
scientists find the ability to stand up and fight, and where loveable losers
step up and accept the mantel of responsibility. It’s really just a re-purposed collection of
all our old familiar war clichés. And
yet, somehow, the movie manages to be entertaining and engaging
moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene.

Perhaps
part of the reason Battleshipsucceeds as ably as it does involves lead actor
Taylor Kitsch. Unlike a lot of young actors
today, he possesses a unique ability to simultaneously be in the action and
comment on the action. He’s nearly Harrison
Ford-esque in this quality.

In
other words, Kitsch manages to convey some sense of self and character outside the specifics of the script,
thus making some of the (groan-worthy) dialogue somehow less important. Kitsch effortlessly carried John
Carter (2012) this summer, which -- pound-for-pound -- is a much better
film, but he performs the same task ably here.
Don’t believe all those stories in the press about Kitsch being in two
major bombs this summer and the catastrophe it means for his film career. This guy is going places (and I fervently wish
one of those places happened to be John Carter 2).

As
for Battleship2: Sub Search, I don’t think we’ll be getting that sequel anytime soon,
and that’s perfectly okay with me. Battleship is a legitimately entertaining
“blockbuster”-type sci-fi film with some downright rousing moments. But not
every sci-fi blockbuster needs to be part of a never-ending franchise.

Battleship stays afloat, but I don’t think
it would be sea worthy for more than this shakedown cruise.

I
love the 1970s. There’s no other way to say
it. It was such a weird and wonderful time, and sometimes I wish I could convey
better the nature of the decade to my young son, or even to readers here on the
blog who are too young to have lived through it.

Sure,
it’s the decade of Star Wars, Space: 1999, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, The Spy
Who Loved Me, Superman: The Movie, King Kong, Logan’s Run, Alien and
many other personal favorites.

And
it’s also the decade of Atari, the Bicentennial Celebration, Mork
and Mindy and Saturday Night Fever.

It’s
even the span of Bigfoot and Killer Bees, as I’ve noted here before.

But
here’s the underlying factor that I remember so fondly about the pop culture landscape
of the 1970s:

It
had not yet been fractured, or as I like to put it, “balkanized.”

In
the 1970s, cable television was still in its infancy, and the day’s news ran
only at 6:00 pm, not on a 24-hour cycle.

We
had three major networks from which to choose original new programming…and that
was it.

Yes,
we had local stations and PBS too, but our choices for televised entertainment were
limited.

The
down-side of that limit, of course, is a lack of choice.

The
up-side is that everyone in America spoke the same pop culture language. Everyone had seenThe Twilight Zone, All in the
Family, Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch and Mission:
Impossible.

It
was a limited universe, to be sure, but a shared
one. Those of Generation X (like me)
still speak this brand of short-hand, one consisting of theme songs and
memories that all began with the words “remember
the one where….”

After
those words, you could be talking Trek, The Twilight Zone or even Happy
Days.

Looking
back, I must conclude that this era of a shared pop culture ended, finally, in
the late 1990s when Seinfeld went off the air. That series (and also The
X-Files) seem to be the last of a breed. They were TV series that all of America united to watch, and talked about around the coffee
cooler the next day.

Today,
you have to tailor your discussion of television (like Walking Dead, Mad Men and
Dexter)
to the right demographic, a much smaller demographic. I can’t talk to my
mother-in-law about Fringe or American Horror Story, for instance. She’s never heard of either…

And
this is the very reason that weird 1970s relics like Battle of the Network Stars
are so entertaining and intriguing to me, even today, in 2012.

This
“contest” program ran on and off -- once
or twice a year -- for roughly a dozen years, from 1976 to 1988. The program was hosted by the incredibly pompous
and bizarre Howard Cosell (1918 – 1995), and it brought together the stars of
network television for some friendly outdoors competition.

You
couldn’t do this kind of thing today.
Now, you’d have AMC, FX, MTV, HBO, Showtime, Fox, The CW, plus ABC, NBC
and CBS all in competition.

It
would be Battle of the Network Cluster-fuck.

But
back in the day, a lot of awesome TV stars got together for these periodic
competitions on ABC, and the shows were always…amusing to say the least.

I
remember, in particular, the games of the year 1978, because they featured the
stars of Battlestar Galactica: Richard Hatch and Maren Jensen, as well
the Hulk himself, Lou Ferrigno.

William Shatner in the 1983 games.

And
last but never least the sublime William Shatner was also a player.

Even
at the time, I couldn’t believe I was seeing Captain Kirk and Captain Apollo on
the same playing field, essentially.

On
the Battle
of the Network Stars, the various TV celebrities competed on teams
(ABC, CBS, NBC) in events like kayaking, swimming, tennis, the baseball dunk,
track-and-field, an obstacle course (?!), and my personal favorite: the tug of war.

I
suppose I was about eight or nine when I watched the 1978 show, and to me it
was just amazing to see my favorite characters interacting as real life people,
instead of as Colonial Warriors or Starfleet officers.

This
is how you know I’m a geek. I actually preferred watching Maren Jensen and
Richard Hatch compete on Battle of the Network Stars than
Nadia Comaneci competing at the Olympics.

Nadia,
after all, never battled the Cylons, Ovions, or Count Iblis.

As
cheesy and silly as they were, The Battle of the Network Stars fostered
a kind of intimacy with the actors on TV that we don’t really get today,
because the entertainment universe is so splintered and so politically correct. Even unscripted TV show performers of Jersey
Shore-ilk appear in tightly-scripted PR appearances devoid of
spontaneity and surprises.

On
The
Battle of the Network Stars, that wasn’t the case. You might see outbreaks
of temper and vanity or moments of laughs and unexpected camaraderie. It was humanizing in a way that today seems positively
quaint.

It’s
not quite the same thing as being a game show contestant. On Battle of the Network Stars, a lot
of celebrities let their hair down, and I always thought was pretty cool.

Below
are some clips from the 1978 Battle of the Network Stars.

Please
revel in them – and in the 1970s --
as I do. The first clip below features Hatch, Shatner, and David Letterman...

The
human figures -- Starbuck and Adama --
came garbed with capes and Colonial laser pistols but oddly, their faces
boasted no color or facial detail. The
eyes and mouth were left unpainted, giving them a kind of “blank” pallor.

The
Cylon came with a fierce-looking, show-accurate rifle, and the Ovion was garbed
in a kind of webby yellow shawl.

The
second series of Mattel Battlestar Galactica figures
consisted of the traitor Baltar, his robotic number one, Lucifer, a golden
Cylon Commander, and a pig monster called a Boray from the episode “The
Magnificent Warriors.”

There
are two big omissions here as you likely noticed from the above tally.

First,
no Captain Apollo action figure was produced, and this is roughly akin to
releasing a Star Wars line without Luke Skywalker, or a Star Trek
line without Captain Kirk.

Secondly,
no female figures were produced. I can understand
why no Cassiopiea wasn’t made, given her non-kiddie designation as a“socialator”
(prostitute…). But why on Earth wasn’t an Athena figure released? Athena (Maren Jensen) was a shuttle pilot and
bridge officer, for goodness sake. I can’t
think of another 1970s action-figure toy line off-hand (from Mego Star
Trek, Black Hole and Buck Rogers to Kenner Star
Wars to Mattel Space: 1999) that featured no female
characters.

At
the time -- as a nine year-old kid --
the bigger concern for me was the glaring lack of a Captain Apollo figure. I would sub-in a Han Solo figure, but the
hair wasn’t right, obviously, and neither was the costuming.

I
have very fond memories of my Granny from Texas, Tippie, buying me several of
these Mattel BSG figures (and even doubling up on the Cylons so I could create
an army…), and how thrilled I was to have them.

Today,
I still have all my original figures, though they are very heavily played with,
and a few mint-in-box. If memory serves,
Lucifer is among the rarest and most prized of the bunch.

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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